Encountering the Deeply Disturbing: Loving Kindness and Transformative Learning

I was listening this morning to a man sitting near me in a coffee shop. To be clear, I didn’t want to listen to him – he was just so loud that it was impossible to tune him out. He was obviously someone who paid significant attention to the political, economic, and environmental forces that are currently shaping our world. He spoke with great authority as his two tablemates listened with what appeared as a mix of skepticism and awe.

Perhaps because of my subtle fear that I was possibly looking into a wormhole on the other end of which was a future me, I tried to listen with a sympathetic ear. It’s a curse of mine that when I hear a person in a public space pontificating about their political and cultural analysis of the entire earth, I have a morbid curiosity as to what is being said. I lean in mentally, trying to catch the arc of the monologue, even as another voice in my mind says to me, “Why are you eavesdropping – this will likely only upset you?!”

Because I’ve found engaging strong-opinioned strangers in coffee shops or bars to be terribly ineffective, I often get my headphones on as quick as I can to avoid the building up of internal tension that will only leave me frustrated. And yet, it only takes a few overheard sentences to send my mind racing. In a world characterized so often by conflict, I often seek to isolate myself from my other and project onto them my sense of frustration and helplessness.

So, today, I am doing two things with my experience: 1) I am practicing a meditative exercise called Loving Kindness, and 2) I am using this encounter as a jumping off point into a discussion of Transformative Learning that I have been wanting to write about for weeks.

Loving Kindness is a simple meditative or contemplative practice that seeks to open up one’s heart to more and more compassion toward self, loved ones, acquaintances, strangers, and the world. I like to use four simple sentences that I learned from Sylvia Boorstein. After saying these sentences first to myself, I say them mentally toward the others on my list as if they were before me and could feel my wish for them:

- May you feel safe.

- May you feel content.

- May you feel strong.

- May you live with ease.

As I do this exercise over the course of about 5 minutes (sometimes much less, sometimes more) I find that I change physically and emotionally. I find that I have a capacity for compassion greater than I did moments before. I find that my frantic mind calms down and that my curiosity becomes light, rather than heavy as in an interrogation. At the same time, my muscles relax a bit and I feel a sense of being big enough to withstand my present discomfort. I don’t run from the discomfort, I find my capacity to be present to it and act with intention.

There’s much more to be said about this practice as it relates to leadership, but for now I will leave it here and move on to my second response to this morning’s encounter: a word about Transformative Learning.

Transformative learning experiences are those where what we learn changes us in such a profound way that new actions become the norm of our behavior. In other words, they don’t just add information to our memory bank; they change the way we make sense of the world at the level of consciousness. When learning is transformative, it leads to changes (sometimes subtle, sometimes dramatic) in the way our minds process information. We make new meaning from the information we encounter and new behaviors follow.

But an encounter with new information is not by itself enough to guarantee transformation. We can consume and interact with vast amounts of information without being changed. The evidence for this is all over cable news and social media where having a loud opinion on the topic of the day has little to do with learning that transforms us. The ability of pundits and influencers to rant, harshly critique, provoke, and discredit are skill sets that will get you millions of followers and billions of dollars. These prevalent ways of processing facts are modeled and rewarded in our society. Transformative Learning is different.

Transformative Learning has three basic components: Storytelling, Dialogue, and Critical Reflection. In a future post I’ll break these down further, but for now, you can understand them as elements that have a special alchemy when combined. Storytelling grounds learning in personal experience and gives weight and meaning to the learning process. Dialogue provides an examination of the assumptions, perspectives, and general taken-for-grantedness of our experiences and the sense we try to make of them. Critical reflection connects the local to the global by connecting our storytelling and dialogue to the context of time and place as well as the systems of which we are all a part.

Combined, these elements give information multiple levels of analysis that ask us to make sense of our experiences in ways that are both personally meaningful and contextually situated in ever-expanding circles of relationship. Learning of this kind has a tendency to sink into our consciousness in part because the information is not isolated or compartmentalized to far corners of our minds. We see how the information is operative and pervasive in the world, and our consciousness is thereby changed.

As I listened to the man in the coffee shop this morning, and I found compassion for him, I heard him say something that changed how I understood his actions. As the man gave a critical tour of the political landscape in the US and world at large, he said that everything being offered to the voting public had been “basically debunked.” He decried the lack of new ideas, saying that everything being offered now was the same as it had been 30 years ago and that we know that none of it works. Then he lamented a larger societal lack of intellectual capacity to come up with new ideas and solutions to the huge problems he had just been laying out for 20 minutes.

My first thought was, “how do you know that the capacity isn’t there or that all the ideas being offered now won’t work? We haven’t actually tried most of them!” It was that moment when I was closest to plopping down at his table to tell him about the thousands of people just in our region who had brilliant ideas and workable solutions but who lacked the political ability to implement them. What evidence could he offer to back up the claim that we have no answers to our environmental, social, and economic challenges?

But then I realized that behind his authoritative posture and wide body of quotable facts he was clearly not feeling safe, not feeling content, not feeling strong, and not living with ease. He was speaking about information that is deeply unsettling and he lacked in that moment a capability to hold the seeming contradiction that we have enormous, stubborn problems to address while also having the capacity to respond effectively to those profound issues. Like many of us, he felt only one of these conditions could be true.

I could relate with that feeling of frustration and even despair. It’s an unpleasant reality to behold. But I believe that before we can be adequately transformed by learning about the massive problems we face, we must encounter the magnitude of our screwed-ness. This encounter is necessarily overwhelming and leads to a number of possible outcomes.

Some of us will encounter the enormity of our social/economic/environmental challenges and walk away from the knowledge altogether. The learning will not sink in and will certainly not change us. Others will encounter this enormity and find ourselves stuck in perpetual despair, angst, and helplessness. Having learned the language of the critique, we will wield it like a belt to flog ourselves and the “others” deserving of blame. For some of us, we will live our whole lives in this space and perhaps even earn the admiration of family, friends, and the public for having the appearance of insight.

I believe that the man in the coffee shop was having this kind of encounter. Having taken the time to learn about the forces and complexities at work in the world, he found himself relaying what he saw to anyone who would listen. And yet he seemed unable to understand that the same world could contain realistic ways forward. He had information, but had not yet experienced a transformation in relation to that learning. It seems true to me that the more challenging the subject being learned, the more challenging it will be to experience transformative learning.

Still others of us will encounter the magnitude of our shared problems, go through many of the same emotional and intellectual challenges just mentioned, and eventually be transformed. We will be transformed in such a way that we find hope, capacity, agency, and clarity that sustains an identifiable shift in both our process of making sense of the world and the integration of actions consistent with our new understanding.

There are ways to facilitate transformative learning experiences. Sufficient time, personal encounter with story and dialogue, and critical reflection are necessary for transformative learning and unfortunately most of our educational spaces lack these elements. Leadership for social and environmental justice benefits greatly from intentional engagement of these kinds. (LBL has a free 1-page PDF guide to aid in planning them).

But the point I want to make here is that as individuals and groups we have the ability to reflect upon the character of our learning. We can notice to what extent we engage in critique that never transforms our way of being in the world. We can examine whether our conclusions about the need for social change always begins with the attitudes and actions of others while demanding little of ourselves. We can observe patterns of thinking that absolve our inaction because of imperfect answers and unproven theories. And when we find that our learning has failed to transform us, we can take action to deepen its meaning, examine its assumptions, and broaden its contextual basis.

When we take the time to practice loving kindness and seek transformative learning we can find freedom from the cycle of isolation and projection. We can find within us the heart and mind big enough to encounter that which is deeply disturbing in the world and continue to work toward justice and peace.

In what situations do you find yourself projecting your sense of fear or inefficacy on others? What learning has yet to transform your way of being in the world? How can you bring elements of Transformative Learning into your contexts?

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